Mass media and public opinion
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Urbanization, industrialization and modernization have created the societal conditions for the development of mass media. The bulk of the content of the mass media is not designed to challenge or modify the social and political structure of a nation, either in a one party state or in a democratic society.The mass media plays a crucial role in forming and reflecting public opinion: it communicates the world to individuals, and it reproduces modern society's self-image. Critiques in the early-to-mid twentieth century suggested that the media destroys the individual's capacity to act autonomously - sometimes being ascribed an influence reminiscent of the telescreens of the dystopian novel 1984. Later empirical studies, however, suggest a more complex interaction between the media and society, with individuals actively interpreting and evaluating the media and the information it provides. The consequences and ramifications of the mass media relate not merely to the way newsworthy events are perceived (and which are reported at all), but also to a multitude of cultural influences which operate through the mass media. Thus Lang and Lang claim that "The mass media force attention to certain issues. They build up public images of political figures. They are constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals in the mass should think about, know about, have feelings about."
Theorists such as Louis Wirth and Talcott Parsons have emphasised the importance of mass media as instruments of social control.In the twenty-first century, with the rise of the internet, the two-way relationship between mass media and public opinion is beginning to change, with the advent of new technologies such as blogging.
Social scientists have made efforts to integrate the study of the mass media as instrument of control with the study of political and economic developments in the Afro-Asian countries. David Lerner(1958) has emphasised the general pattern of increase in standard of living, urbanization , literacy and expsore to the mass media during the process of transition from traditional to modern society. According to Lerner,while there is a heavy emphasis on the expanding of the mass media in developing societies, the penetration of the central authority into the daily consciousness of the mass has to overcome profound resistance.
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[edit] Government and Mass Media
The commission on Freedom of the press(1947) has listed most political and legal controls that have commonly been applied to the media. They include licensing in advance;censorship of offending material before publication;seizure of offending material;injunctions against publication of a newspaper or book or of specified content;requirement of surety bonds against libel or other offense;compulsory disclosure of ownership and authority;post publication criminal penalities for objectionable matter;post publication collection of damages in a civil action;post publication correction of libel and other misstatements;discrimination in granting access to news source and facilities;discrimination and denial in the use of communications facilities for distribution;taxes;discriminatory subsidies;and interference with buying, reading and listening.
[edit] Public sphere
[edit] Structural transformation
Habermas believed that society becomes increasingly polarised into spheres of 'public authority'(referring to the emergence of the state and associated political activity); and the 'private' (which was the intimate domain of private relationships and the family). Jürgen Habermas believed that the development of mass media was an crucial factor in the transition from an absolutist regime to liberal-democratic society. With the invention of the printing press and then the availability of newspapers and other forms of printed literature, Habermas claimed the emergence of an intermediate sphere which according to him is the bourgeois public sphere. This space will provide individuals with a chance to gather together to critically access,discuss and evaluate important contemporary issues of atmost importance for the people. He claimed that this will resemble the Greek agora. Habermas claims that this public use of reason not only acts as a regulatory mechanism over the state, which is now highly visible, but also as a catalyst for the replacement of the absolutist regime with a liberal democratic government.
[edit] Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School came into existence in order to explain the success of Nazism in Weimar Germany. It sees the loss of individuality through decline of privacy as the main cause of dependence on great mass organisations. Habermas to a certain extent depends on some early critiques of the media from the ‘Frankfurt School’, such as that of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. For these three, media was a 'culture industry' which was creating an impact on passive individuals. These individuals merely absorb any information they are exposed to. (A clear influence of Karl Marx can be seen here, with links to the theory of alienation.) According to Thompson, the cause of this is the commodification of art and culture, which allows the possibility of "manipulation by demagogues".Emily Durkheim claimed that the interdependence of highly specialised individuals, or what is known as ‘organic solidarity’, is seen as being succeeded by a new and barbarous homogeneity. Due to this, only a ‘mechanical’ cohesion is possible, dependent on similarity and standardisation. Horkheimer thus argued that, paradoxically, individuality was impaired by the decline in the impulse for collective action. According to him, ‘As the ordinary man withdraws from participating in political affairs, society tends to revert to the law of the jungle, which crushes all vestiges of individuality.’ In this analysis the Frankfurt school saw totalitarianism emerging as a result of corrupt social institutions and the decline of liberal principles. Thus Horkheimer claimed that: “Just as the slogans of rugged individualism are politically useful to large trusts in society seeking exemption from social control, so in mass culture the rhetoric of individuality, by imposing patterns for collective imitation, subverts the very principle to which it gives lip service.” Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity claimed that “mass media can create an aura which makes the spectator seem to experience a non-existent actuality”. Thus a mass-produced, artificial culture replaces what went before.
[edit] Mass media and modern public sphere
In political behaviour, opinion leading tends to correlate positively with status, whereas this is not the case in consumer behaviour . So for political behaviour, the general conclusion that the media merely fixes (confirms) people’s opinion is not supported. Hovland, using experimental psychology, found significant effects of information on longer-term behaviour and attitudes, particularly in areas where most people have little direct experience (e.g. politics) and have a high degree of trust in the source (e.g. broadcasting). Since class has become a less reliable indicator of party (since the surveys of the 40s and 50s) the floating voter today is no longer the apathetic voter, but likely to be more well-informed than the consistent voter — and this mainly through the media.
There is also some very persuasive and empirical evidence suggesting that it is ‘personal contact, not media persuasiveness’ which counts. For example, Trenaman and McQuail (1961) found that ‘don’t knows’ were less well informed than consistent voters, appearing uninterested, showing a general lack of information, and not just ignorance of particular policies or policies of one particular party. During the 1940 presidential election, a similar view was expressed by Katz and Lazarsfeld's theory of the two-step flow of communication, based on a study of electoral practices of the citizens of Erie County, Ohio. This examined the political propaganda prevalent in the media at the time during the campaign period to see whether it plays an integral role in influencing people's voting. (In terms of generalising their results, one should note that there are questions about short term versus long term influence). The results contradict this: Lazarsfeld et al (1944) find evidence for the Weberian theory of party, and identify certain factors, such as socio-economic circumstances, religious affiliation and area of residence, which together determine political orientation. The study claims that political propaganda serves to re-affirm the individual's pre-disposed orientation rather than to influence or change one's voting behaviour.
Thompson does not see ‘mediated quasi-interaction’ (the monological, mainly one-way communication of the mass media) as dominant, but rather as intermingling with traditional face-to-face interactions and mediated interactions (such as telephone conversations). Contrary to Habermas’ pessimistic view, this allows both more information and discussion to come into the public domain (of mediated quasi-interaction) and more to be discussed within the private domain (since the media provides information individuals would not otherwise have access to).
[edit] Mass Media in a free enterprise society
Although a sizeable portion of mass media offerings-particularly news, commentaries, documentaries, and other informational programmes- deal with highly controversial subjects, the major portion of mass media offerings are designed to serve an entertainment function. These programmes tend to avoid controversial issues and reflect beliefs and values sanctified by mass audience. This course is followed by Television networks, whose investment and production costs are high. Jerry Mander’s work has highlighted this particular outlook. According to him, the atomised individuals of mass society lose their souls to the phantom delights of the film, the soap opera, and the variety show. They fall into a stupor; an apathetic hypnosis Lazarsfeld was to call the ‘narcotizing dysfunction’ of exposure to mass media. Individuals become ‘irrational victims of false wants’ - the wants which corporations have thrust upon them, and continue to thrust upon them, through both the advertising in the media (with its continual exhortation to consume) and through the individualist consumption culture it promulgates. Thus, according to the Frankfurt School, leisure has been industrialised. The production of culture had become standardised and dominated by the profit motive as in other industries. In a mass society leisure is constantly used to induce the appropriate values and motives in the public. The modern media train the young for consumption. ‘Leisure had ceased to be the opposite of work, and had become a preparation for it.’
[edit] Mass media and agenda setting
The agenda setting process is partly one which is an almost unavoidable function of the process involved in newsgathering by the large organisations which make up much of the mass media. (Just four main news agencies - AP, UPI, Reuters and Agence-France-Presse - claim together to provide 90% of the total news output of the world’s press, radio and television.) Stuart Hall points out that because some of the media produce material which often is good, impartial, and serious, they are accorded a high degree of respect and authority. But in practice the ethic of the press and television is closely related to that of the homogeneous establishment, providing a vital support for the existing order. But independence (eg of the BBC) is not “a mere cover, it is central to the way power and ideology are mediated in societies like ours.” The public are bribed with good radio, television and newspapers into an acceptance of the biased, the misleading, and the status quo. The media are not, according to this approach, crude agents of propaganda. They organise public understanding. However, the overall interpretations they provide in the long run are those which are most preferred by, and least challenging to, those with economic power. Greg Philo demonstrates this in his 1991 article, “Seeing is Believing”, in which he showed that recollections of the 1984 miners’ strike were strongly correlated with the media’s original presentation of the event, including the perception of the picketing as largely violent (violence was rare), and the use of phrases which had appeared originally in the media of the time.
McCombs and Shaw (1972) demonstrate the agenda-setting effect at work in a study conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA during the 1968 presidential elections. Having selected a representative sample of un-decided voters, they were asked to outline the key issues of the election as they perceived them. Concurrently, the mass media serving these subjects were collected and analysed as regards their content. The results showed a definite correlation between the two accounts of predominant issues. "The evidence in this study that voters tend to share the media's composite definition of what is important strongly suggests an agenda-setting function of the mass media." (McCombs and Shaw).
[edit] Mass media in the internet age
Mander’s theory is related to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of ‘hyperreality’. We can take the 1994 O.J. Simpson trial as an example, where the reality reported on was merely the catalyst for the simulacra (images) created, which defined the trial as a global event and made the trial more than it was. Essentially, hyperreality is the concept that the media is not merely a window on to the world (as if a visiting alien were watching TV), but is itself part of the reality it describes. Hence (although additionally there is the question of navel-gazing) the media’s obsession with media-created events. It is this which lead Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s to say that "the medium is the message", and to suggest that mass media was increasingly creating a "global village". Thus, for example, there is evidence that Western media influences in Asia are the driving force behind rapid social change: “it is as if the 1960s and the 1990s were compressed together.” A notable example is the recent introduction of television to Bhutan, with dramatic effects in terms of very rapid Westernization. This raises questions of ‘cultural imperialism’ (Schiller) - the de facto imposition, through economic and political power and through the media, of Western (and in particular US) culture.
[edit] Mass media,mass culture and elite
The relation of the mass media to contemporary popular culture is commonly conceived in terms of dissemination from the elite to the mass. There are periods when this process is reversed. During the 18th century it was the utmost chic for the aristocrats of the French Court to assume the guise of shepherds and peasants in their restive outings.
The long-term consequences of this are significant in conjunction with the continuing concentration of ownership and control of the media, leading to accusations of a 'media elite' having a form of 'cultural dictatorship'. Thus the continuing debate about the influence of 'media barons' such as Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch. For example, the UK Observer (March 1st 1998) reported the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins' refusal to publish Chris Patten's East and West, because of the former Hong Kong Governor's description of the Chinese leadership as "faceless Stalinists" possibly being damaging to Murdoch's Chinese broadcasting interests. In this case, the author was able to have the book accepted by another publisher, but this kind of censorship may point the way to the future. A related, but more insidious, form is that of self-censorship by members of the media in the interests of the owner, in the interests of their careers.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Adorno, Theodor (1973), The Jargon of Authenticity
- Chomsky, Noam & Herman, Edward (1988, 2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.
- Curran, J. & Seaton, J. (1988), Power without Responsibility
- Curran, J. & Gurevitch, M. (eds) (1991), Mass Media and Society
- Habermas, J. (1962), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
- Horkheimer (1947), The Eclipse of Reason, Oxford University Press
- Lang K & Lang G.E. (1966), The Mass Media and Voting
- Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet (1944), The People’s Choice
- Mander, Jerry, “The Tyranny of Television”, in Resurgence No. 165
- McCombs, M & Shaw, D.L. (1972), 'The Agenda-setting Function of the Mass Media', Public Opinion Quarterly, 73, pp176-187
- David Riesman (1950), The Lonely Crowd
- Thompson, J. (1995), The Media and Modernity
- Trenaman J., and McQuail, D. (1961), Television and the Political Image. Methuen.
